Jurgen and the Censor

JURGEN AND THE CENSOR REPORT OF THE EMERGENCY COMMITTEE ORGANIZED TO PROTEST AGAINST THE SUPPRESSION OF JAMES BRANCH CABELLS JURGEN -- PRIVATELY PRINTED FOR THE EMERGENCY COMMITTEE EDWARD HALE BIERSTADT BARRETT H. CLARK SIDNEY HOWARD -- 1920, -- CONTENTS Preface.. ........................................ James Branch Cabell Letter from the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice,. ..................................... .John S. Sumner Report of the Emergency Committee.. ............. .Barrett H. Clark, Secretary MORALS, Not Art or Literature. ............... Edward Hale Bierstadt List of Signers of the Protest.. Letters to the Emergency Committee. .............. Joseph Hergesheimer Burton Rascoe William Lyon Phelps Edward Sheldon Kate Douglas Wiggin Sinclair Lewis Christopher Morley Brander Matthews Henry Turner Bailey Lawrence Gilman Pierre Troubetzkoy John Drinkwater Harriei Ford E. P. Costigan Paul E. More Theodore Dreiser Walter Lippmann Mary E. Wilkins Freeman Arnold Bennett Owen Wister Padraic Colum Thomas H. Dickinson Hugh Walpole Mary Austin Charles Rann Kennedy J. W. Linn H. L. Mencken St. John Ervine George Moore Letters to the Publisheri ......................... Amelie Rioes Troubetzkoy l Pierre Troubetzkoy Ellis P. Oberholizer Ernest A. Boyd Gilbert Cannan Echoes From the Press The Judging of Jurgen. ......................... Jamw Branch Cabell The Rainbow and Jurgen.. ..................... .Gilberf Cannan Is Any Book Safe. ............................. New York Times Lift Literary Load Off Police.. ................... New York Evening Sun Appendix A ...................................... Extracts from the Penal Code of the State of New York and the United States Criminal Code. Appendix B. .................................... .Ex tracts from MORALS, Not Art or Literature ............................................. PREFACE By James Branch Cabell In reply to the questions you ask me, nothing could be more valueless than my personal opinion of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and of , its attitude toward Jurgen. Of a proceeding by which I have been robbed and vilified I cannot be expected to speak or think without bias. The part of wisdom, therefore, is silence. Yet-since a literary allusion is always more or less my foible as a prosperous and affected pseudo-1itterateur- I would temper this taciturnity by referring you to the fragmentary MS. of The Judging of Jurgen, which if it really dates from the fourteenth century, seems curiolsly prophetic. As to censorship of our reading-matter, I concede this may, in theory, be advisable. In practice, though, I can imagine no personsor class of persons quali- fied to perform this censorship. Pace the Vice Society, there is certainly a difference between pornography and fine literature, if but the difference that everybody enjoys the first where few care one way or the other about the second and certainly the two should be appraised by diverse and appropriate standards. A work of art should therefore, in theory, be judged entirely as a work of art, by a jury of practitioners of the art concerned. Yet, since every self-respecting author at bottom abominates his cornpetitors, despises his inferiors, and is frantically irritated by the work of those who differ from him in aesthetic canons, such an arrangement would, in practice, only fling open more wpicuous fields wherein to flaunt the mutual spite and miscomprehension common to us creative writers...